"Relax, Don't Do It": Faculty-Student Consensual Relationships

Over the years, I have written a couple of articles on faculty-student consensual relationships in higher education both from a policy perspective and a constitutional perspective in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas.

In those articles, I suggested a sliding scale approach for universities to adopt with regard to permitting such relationships.  With supervisory situations, the presumption was that such relationships should not be permitted unless the faculty member could show unusual circumstances which justified the relationship.  On the other hand, nonsupervisory situations should be presumptively permitted unless the university could show unusual circumstances which made the relationship particularly damaging to the university, fellow faculty members, or fellow students.  I felt that this balancing approach adequately took into account the interests of the university and the individuals involved in such relationships (including interested third-parties).

This story from the University of Oklahoma School of Law is a classic supervisory relationship situation that should have never started in the first place.  The story is filled with allegations that a sexual relationship started between a professor and a student when they were both married and while the student was in the professor's class, that they ended up having a child together out of wedlock (though the professor fought paternity), and that now there is a big bruhaha over whether the university conducted an adequate investigation into alleged professorial misconduct.

Putting the legal niceties aside for the moment, let me clear about how I view these relationships: both faculty and students, whether in supervisory or non-supervisory situations, should go to pains to avoid such relationships.  They're just not worth it.

PS